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Hrvoje Ivanković
Sixty Years of the Dubrovnik Summer Festival Theatre
(With Special Reference to the Last Decade)
The foundation of the Dubrovnik Summer Festival was a
result of the long-standing attempts to organise - under the
influence of similar European institutions - a summer festival,
during which theatre, music and folklore performances would
take place in the historic and natural ambient of Dubrovnik. In
spite of several attempts and additional incentives (for
instance, Gundulić’s play Dubravka, directed by Tito Strozzi
performed by the Croatian National Theatre of Zagreb in front
of the Rector's Palace in 1933; the first music festival at
Sponza Palace in 1938; performances at Bošković Square in
1949) the idea was realised as late as in September 1950,
when the Dubrovnik Festival of the Dalmatian 16th and 17th
Century Plays was organised. In addition to the plays
performed by the theatres of Belgrade, Dubrovnik, Split,
Zadar and Zagreb at the Summer Stage in Gradac Park, the
Festival included several music and folklore performances.
The event is considered the official beginning of the
Dubrovnik Summer Festival. Decisive for its continuity were
the efforts of Branko Begović, Marko Fotez and other
enthusiasts, who organised the summer season of the National
Theatre and the City Orchestra of Dubrovnik in 1951,
completed with the operatic and ballet performances of the
National Theatre of Sarajevo. That season, Marko Fotez's
staging of Plakir by Marin Držić, in Gradac Park, denoted the
beginning of the history of the Festival's ambient theatre, as its
basic feature, which was confirmed through the theatre
programme concept already in the summer of 1952. On that
occasion Miše Račić staged Carlo Goldoni's Fishermen
Quarrels in the Old City Harbour, while Marko Fotez directed
his own amalgamation of Držić's Plays Tirena and A Story of
Stanac in front of Sponza Palace. Fotez also staged
Shakespeare's Hamlet at Fort Lovrjenac, which continued to
be on the programme for twelve seasons consecutively with
different line-ups, having become the world famous symbol of
the Dubrovnik Festival. In spite of many problems with the
organisation and dilemmas regarding its concept, this was the
period when the Festival began to be constituted as a serious
summer event, which could in principle be compared with
similar festivals that were started in several European cities
during the first post-war decade. In the organisational and
financial sense, the forming of the first Festival Commission
(1953) was crucial, and so was the acquired status of an
institution with independent funding, under the patronage of
Josip Broz Tito (1954). It meant a secure future for the
Festival, but also its partial dependence on the political
influence. From 1954 the Festival organisers began to work on
a more solid concept of the music programme. Important for
the theatre programme was the founding of the Festival Drama
Ensemble, which began to function as a permanent production
model, enabling the Festival to have its own plays with the
finest actors from the entire country. From 1955, the Festival
occasionally hosted international theatre plays, and the system
of their selection in the future was mainly based on the
relatively frequent guest appearances from England (the Old
Vic Theatre Company, the Prospect Theatre Company, The
New Shakespeare Company, the London National Theatre,
etc.) with Shakespeare's works. At the same time, the stagings
of Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris in Gradac Park, Vojnović's
On the Terrace, at the Gundulić Summer Residence in Gruž
(directed by B. Gavella, 1953), and Shakespeare's A
Midsummer Night's Dream (Gradac Park, directed by M.
Fotez, 1954) became the foundation and essential feature of
the Festival's theatre programme. Based on the works by
national and international classic authors, Držić and
Shakespeare in the first place, the theatre programme seldom
included the works by contemporary writers. It rather
developed by accepting the contemporary theatre ideas slowly
and extremely cautiously and by re-defining the ambient
theatre concept (from the literal incorporation of a play into its
environment to using the ambient as a metaphor or an active
participant in the play), reluctant to start a polemical dialogue
with the actual social problems and phenomena. In addition to
Marko Fotez, the first part of the history of the Dubrovnik
Summer Festival was marked by the theatre director Branko
Gavella, who - apart from the afore mentioned plays - staged
Lucić's The Slave Woman (1954), Držić's Tirena (1958) and
Hecuba (1959), as well as Gundulić's Dubravka (1960). On
several occasions from 1950 to 1961, they were joined by
Bojan Stupica, but only with his guest performances (several
versions of Uncle Maroje, Fishermen's Quarrels, Twelfth
Night), which were often in conflict with the accepted
postulates of the ambient theatre. In the summer of 1958,
marking the 450th anniversary of Držić's birth, Kosta Spaić
staged Držić's play The Miser in the Music School Park.
Thanks to the virtuosity of its protagonist, Izet Hajdarhodžić,
the play became an emblematic Festival's performance, and a
major event in the context of the attempt to bring Držić's work
closer to the receptive system of the contemporary theatre
viewer. With a gradual disappearance of the first generation
artists who defined the Festival programme, and also because
of the constant lack of agreement regarding the repertoire
policy (which was decided by the special commissions for
theatre and music), the Festival faced a major crisis in the late
1950s, which resulted in the change of the Festival
management in 1964: the first Festival director Joško Depolo
(1954 - 1964) was replaced by Fani Muhoberac, while Kosta
Spaić and Milan Horvat were appointed directors of theatre
and music programme. According to Spaić's concept, Držić
and Shakespeare remained the main strongholds of the theatre
programme. His anthological staging of Uncle Maroje
(Gundulić Square, 1964) is the first modern-history Dubrovnik
staging of the original version of the play, and so is Joško
Juvančić's staging of Grižula or Plakir (Gradac Park, 1967).
With the new staging of Hamlet (directed by Denis Carrey,
1967) and several guest performances, the Festival repertoire
of Shakespeare’s plays was expanded by the ambient staging
of Twelfth Night (directed by Georgij Paro, 1964), Othello
(directed by Stuart Burge, 1964) and Macbeth (directed by
Vlado Habunek, 1970). There was also an attempt to expand
the classical repertoire with guest performances and Festival
productions, which, among other plays, included Calderon's
The Mayor of Zalamea (directed by Dino Radojević, 1966),
The Life and Passion of St Cyprian and St Justina by Marin
Gazarović (directed by Božidar Violić, 1968) and Pavlimir
Mystery Play of 1971, after the drama by Junije Palmotić
(directed by K. Spaić, 1971). From 1968 on, aiming to make
the Festival repertoire more dynamic and modern, Spaić
introduced the so called Midnight Recitals and - from 1969 guest performances of international ensembles on a regular
basis, the most attractive among them including the
Stadttheater of Basel with Friedrich Dürenmatt's Play
Strindberg (1969) and the Teatro Libero of Rome (Lodovico
Ariosto: Orlando Furioso, directed by Luca Ronconi, 1970).
Such attempts culminated in 1971 with the first performance
of a work by a contemporary Croatian author at the Festival
(Ivan Kušan: The Purpose of Freedom, directed by Miro
Meñimorec), while Paro's direction of The Life of Eduard II
by Bertolt Brecht clearly revealed the modern stage expression
tendencies. In the political purge that took place in 1971, after
the breakdown of „Croatian Spring“, the Festival director Fani
Muhoberac was relieved of her post. Expressing their support,
Kosta Spaić and his assistant Izet Hajdarhodžić resigned. Niko
Napica was appointed new Festival director (he served in this
post - including a short break - till 1985, when he was replaced
by Luka Obradović). During a short period when Marijan
Matković took over the directorship of theatre programme,
particularly prominent were Paro's stagings of two plays by
Miroslav Krleža: Aretaeus (performed from 1972 - 1983 in
several venues at the Bokar Fort, the play is considered a
canonical achievement of the Festival's ambient theatre) and
Christopher Columbus, performed on an enlarged replica of
the sailboat Santa Maria (1973). In spite of the controversy it
caused, the staging of Uncle Maroje (directed by J. Juvančić,
1974) - based on the recent literary and historic interpretations
of Držić's works - was also important, while Plakir or Grižula
(directed by J. Juvančić, 1973), and Hamlet (directed by D.
Radojević, 1974) were re-included in the Festival repertoire.
The period in which Georgij Paro alone - or in collaboration
with Joško Juvančić - was in charge of the theatre programme
began in the summer of 1976 by a cycle of ancient tragedies
(William Gaskill directed Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and
Oedipus at Colonus, and Ivica Kunčević staged Zlatarić's
translation in verse of Sophocles' Electra). The Festival,
however, continued with the eclectic repertoire including
numerous guest performances, occasional staging of
contemporary works (such as Ranko Marinković's Glorija,
directed by G. Paro, 1980 and Edward Bond's Lear, directed
by Ljubiša Georgijevski, 1981) and the revitalization of
„standard repertoire items“, of which only Juvančić's staging
of The Trilogy of Dubrovnik (Skočibuha Palace, 1979) was a
major success. The most popular play at the time was
Goldoni's La Bottega del caffè (directed by Tomislav Radić in
1978), which Frano Čale transposed into the linguistic and
existential milieu of the early 20th century Dubrovnik. From
1980 – 1983 the Dubrovnik Young People’s Theatre Days
took place within the Festival. In spite of its varied programme
(in 1980 it, for instance, comprised the Dogtroep of
Amsterdam, the Bread and Puppet Theatre of New York, the
Histrion Theatre Company and the Youth Group of Žrnovo),
this mini festival was an intriguing but brief attempt to
incorporate alternative theatre into the Dubrovnik Summer
Festival. The Days also included the premiere of the ritualized
staging of Držić's Hecuba (Pozdravi Theatre Company,
director Ivica Boban, 1982), as a major contribution in
evaluating the theatre output of Marin Držić.
In the mid 1980s, the Dubrovnik Summer Festival, the Marin
Držić Theatre and the Dubrovnik Symphony Orchestra
become one institution (the Dubrovnik Festival), and the
Artistic Council headed by Joško Juvančić was in charge of
the theatre programme (Juvančić was the theatre programme
director from 1992 - 2000). This period is characteristic of the
stagings of church mystery plays by J. Juvančić (Ecce homo,
1985; Mavro Vetranović’s So the Brethren Gave Joseph
Away, 1990), and W. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet
(directed by I. Kunčević, 1986), Euripides' Phoenician Women
(directed by Paolo Magelli, 1987), Calderón's Life is a Dream
(directed by Dušan Jovanović, 1987), the radical
reinterpretation of Uncle Maroje (directed by P. Magelli at the
Pustijerna archaeological site, 1989) and the restaged version
of Hecuba (as a Festival Drama Ensemble performance,
directed by Ivica Boban), which, in the summer of 1991,
amazingly coincided with the beginning of the Serbian-
Montenegrin aggression against Croatia. After the unblocking
of the city and liberation of the Dubrovnik region, the largest
part of which had been occupied and burned down, the
Dubrovnik Summer Festival again became an independent
institution (from 1991 – 1996 under the directorship of Tomo
Vlahutin and from 1996 – 1999 of Frano Matušić). It
gradually restored its classical repertoire (Tirena, Iphigenia in
Tauris, Hamlet, Uncle Maroje, The Miser) and engaged new
theatre directors (Ozren Prohić directed a patchwork-play
comprising fragments from Držić's works entitled Father
Marin's Dreams, and Janusz Kica directed Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar), whereas the plays directed by Ivica Kunčević
attracted special attention either because of the actualization of
classical works (M. Držić's Tirena, 1993) or the splendid
ambient theatre achievements (Mato Vodopić's A Tale of Sad
Jele, 1994).
*****
The turn of the century in the Dubrovnik Summer Festival was
marked by debates about its organisation scheme and
management. The situation was resolved in 2002, when a new
managing model was finally defined. From then on, the
institution was headed by a festival director responsible for
business and artistic policy of the Festival, whereas his
assistants in charge of the theatre and music programme were
appointed directors of these two programme segments.
The last two seasons under the directorship of Joško Juvančić
(1999 and 2000) were characteristic of the new stagings of
two formative works of the Festival theatre programme:
Vojnović's The Trilogy of Dubrovnik and Držić's Uncle
Maroje. In the summer of 1999, Joško Juvančić staged his
Trilogy, as a special kind of synthesis of previous versions of
this play, in the Art School Park. This was the first time in the
Festival history that all parts of Vojnović's Trilogy were
performed in the same venue. Conceptualised as a realistic
classical play with enviable dramatic consistency and
seductive nostalgic quality, Juvančić's Trilogy aimed to create
the authentic atmosphere of „the yesterday Dubrovnik“ and to
enliven Vojnović's characters. Such staging and the first class
ensemble (in addition to the actors from the so called golden
period of the Festival, the ensemble included the outstanding
members of the middle and new generation of actors) - created
a specific exchange of emotions with the local audience
typical of Dubrovnik and its Festival. Awarded many times,
the play was on the programme for five consecutive seasons,
and the audience experienced it as another evocation of its
collective (historic and Festival) memory.
Kunčević's staging of Uncle Maroje in the summer of 2000
was based on completely different premises. Like in his
anthological staging of the Uncle at the Croatian National
Theatre of Zagreb (1981) that had never been shown in
Dubrovnik, Kunčević treated this Držić's masterpiece as a
potentially subversive text, in whose underground currents one
could also catch a glimpse of the actual social correlations. In
accordance with his consistent theatralization of the City, he
chose a venue that had never been used before – the Fish
Market or Peskarija in the Old City Harbour, situated in a little
square adjacent to the Rector's Palace, as an unnamed symbol
of the city authorities and everything connected with them.
One more time Kunčević used the ambient as a metaphor; the
venues also suggested the antitheses immanent in Držić's work
and the principles of the mafiocratic social system and
relations in the new world of transition. Turned into a symbol
of authority, Laura was not present in physical form in
Kunčević's staging of the Uncle. However, all verticals of the
play led to her residence on the Rector's Palace terrace after
all. Through a constant conflict between the upper, glamorous
world and the liveliness of the plebeian marketplace in the
grip of vice, the polarity «small ones – big ones», the «true»
and «unworthy» people was developing, which drew the
somewhat comic-wise restrained Kunčević's Uncle Maroje
nearer to the contemporariness at least as much as the poorly
reviewed and misunderstood Paolo Magelli's staging in the
summer of 1989. The second Festival premiere in the
anniversary year 1999 was Le malade imaginaire, actually
Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid, turned into Dubrovnik’s
linguistic and existential milieu in the early 18th century. In
the second half of the 1990s, aiming to expand the Dubrovnik
heritage repertoire at the Festival, Joško Juvančić explored the
possibilities of staging the works from the rich opus of
Dubrovnik's adaptations of the works by Molière, and this
project completed a small cycle of the plays of the kind (it was
preceded by George Dandin ou Le Mari confondu, 1997, and
Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, 1998), which – in spite of the
substantial artistic achievements - did not leave a visible trace.
Namely, the choice of the French adaptations obviously did
not aim at the socially critical part of Molière's opus, and these
plays also used up their stage power mainly in implementing
the famous quotation from the prologue to The Mistress of
Elide: «I have no other thoughts but to recite comedies as the
things that make people laugh». However, the dynamic and
humorous staging of Le malade imaginaire (directed by Jiří
Menzel), with the superb Pero Kvrgić - who again became the
ruler of the Dubrovnik stages in the eighth decade of his life
(he played as many as four roles in the summer of 2002) - is
remembered as one of the plays that did not try to establish a
dialogue with the ambient in which they were performed. This
one more time showed the entire complexity of the often
suggested co-production model involving the Festival and
other Croatian theatres. The old idea about the plays that
would - after their premiere at the Dubrovnik Summer Festival
- continue their life on the stages of the co-production theatres,
was in the first place actualized out of necessity in the first
years after the Croatian War of Independence. The extended
life of Le malade imaginaire (after the Dubrovnik premiere it
was played more than a hundred times at the Komedija
Theatre of Zagreb) was obviously the reason why the Festival
returned to this model several times during this entire period,
although in somewhat modified form, with the plays that unlike Le malade imaginaire - had originally been created in
the Dubrovnik ambient and later performed in the classical
theatres.
If Juvančić, in the last two years of his directorship, closed the
merely broached French adaptations opus, he definitely
offered the possibility of opening a new phase in the Festival
history with the second premiere play in 2000. That summer
Fort Lovrjenac served as the stage for Luigi Pirandello's
Henry IV. It was suggestively directed by Nenni Delmestre,
who used the Dubrovnik's legendary Hamlet venue for further
elaboration of the eternal Pirandelloan play between reality
and fiction. One more time Dubrovnik found out that its
potential theatrical venues could be suitable for the works by
the so called modern classic authors; it was noticed one more
time - as was the case with the quickly forgotten examples of
Krleža's Aretaeus, Brecht's Eduard II and Marinković's
Glorija - that the contemporariness went equally well with the
Dubrovnik contemporariness, and that the repertoire turn
towards modern drama could bring the so much needed inner
dynamics, actuality and diversity to the Festival theatre
programme.
Everything afore mentioned began to materialize for a
moment in 2001, in the 52nd Festival season, when - in the
midst of the Festival management crisis - the committees
consisting of several people defined the theatre and music
programme. That summer, in the devastated lobby of the
severely damaged Belvedere Hotel, Ivica Boban staged The
Fourth Sister by the contemporary Polish playwright Janusz
Glowacky, one of the most penetrating dramatic probes into
the chaos and hopelessness that ruled one part of the postcommunist world. With plenty of auto-referential ideas,
Georgij Paro staged Christopher Columbus, the poetic-oniric
burlesque by the Belgian writer Michel de Ghelderode at
Porporela. This was his comeback to the Festival, after some
twenty years, where both as theatre director and director of
theatre programme he left a significant trace. Although through a blend of intimate and global, realistic and
hallucinatory, comic and tragic - The Fourth Sister offered a
more contemporary theatrical expression and a larger number
of authentic dramatic tones from the attractive, but too onedimensional and artificial Christopher Columbus, these two
plays encouraged the more and more intensive debates on the
Festival turn towards the repertoire that would effectively
communicate with both tradition and contemporariness.
The newly appointed Festival director Ivica Prlender and
theatre programme director Ivica Kunčević undoubtedly
understood the necessity of such a turn, and declared war to
the repertoire's mummification and lethargy in the first two
seasons of their mandate. Admittedly, this was not done in
some programme text (the kind which the Festival lacked
since Spaić's records from the mid 1960s) but directly «on the
spot», through the choice of titles and selection of theatre
directors. Kunčević and Prlender wish the Festival theatre
programme to be a place of vivid polemics, and the first being
targeted is Dubrovnik with both its mentality and recent
problems threatening to make the City even more profane. In
his first season Kunčević directed the famous play by
Friedrich Dürenmatt, The Old Lady's Visit, in which the «main
character» is the materially and spiritually devastated «city of
culture» Güllen, characteristic of the provincial mentality,
selfishness, timidity and hypocrisy of its residents. Engaging a
large ensemble and using wide film frames and unobtrusive
realism imbued with elements of grotesque and caricature,
Kunčević filled every corner of the large space of the former
Radeljević oil factory in Gruž with high voltage intensity,
searching for nothing but the true sets of Güllen, the universal
stage of Dürenmatt's modern morality, turned into an exciting
Dubrovnik play by means of associative transfer. Another new
play in the Festival theatre programme was contextualised at
the same level of association: the comedy Los intereses
creados (The Bonds of Interest) by the Spanish Nobel Prize
winner Jacinto Benavente. The very fact that the play was set
into the Dubrovnik environment - Luko Paljetak translated it
under the title Ingropani interesi (The Entangled Interests) revealed Kunčević's guiding idea. Namely, Benavente
ridiculed the mentality of the spiritually stale society. The
selfishness, narrow-mindedness and calculating attitude of its
members become the object of easy manipulation by the two
shrewd cheaters, so that the challenge of comic clichés in Los
intereses creados was joined by the potentially provocative
satiric stings. The renowned Slovenian director Vito Taufer, a
new and by all means desirable name at the Dubrovnik
Summer Festival, used only a part of the offered cues, leaving
the play in a kind of dilemma between theatricality and naive
popular comedy. Furthermore, St John's Fort Terrace was not
a suitable venue for the play, so that its life ended that same
season.
If the contemporary Dubrovnik theme had merely peeped
shyly from the premieres at the 53rd Dubrovnik Summer
Festival, the following summer – like never before – it also
became an unmistakable source of a play. Kunčević, namely,
invited Nataša Rajković and Bobo Jelčić. The truly original
style of this directing and dramaturgical tandem - already
renowned in a wider European context - was based on the
amalgamation of the real/private and fictitious/theatrical, and
on the full participation of the actors/performers in all
elements of the theatrical act creation. This peculiar precedent
in the recent history of the Festival, which had traditionally
been suspicious of the authors coming from the sphere of
unconventional and experimental theatre, resulted in a play
entitled the Walking, Talking & Inventing Workshop. The play
began in the venue Iza Roka, in the courtyard of the Domus
Christi Old People's Home, ended at the Mrtvo Zvono Square,
and in the meantime moved through six other venues,
including both interiors and exteriors of the neglected,
southern part of the Old City, hidden from the customary
tourist routes. Apart from the professional actors, and partly
students of the Zagreb Academy of Theatre Arts (in
collaboration with which the project was realised), Rajković's
and Jelčić's Workshop included local residents that happened
to be in situ - the Home's inmates, children, eccentrics,
married couples and lonely people - interweaving their life
stories, real or imagined, with the reality of theatrical
performance. Important also as a new contribution to the
Festival's ambient theatre (the walk from one venue to another
gave the ambient an active dramaturgical function, as was the
case with Paro's staging of Krleža's Aretaeus), the Workshop
grew into a penetrating phenomenological probe into the
contemporary Dubrovnik, revealing the people on the other
side of the gold-plated theatre sets in the every-day pursuit of
a bit of happiness.
In the summer of 2003, apart from the resolute turn towards
contemporary themes and modern theatrical expression, the
Festival management showed that it also based the theatre
programme re-design on two more postulates: the expansion
of the circle of classical titles adaptable to the Dubrovnik
ambients, and the radically new interpretations of the
formative works of the Festival repertoire. The former was
connected with the highly cultivated staging of Heinrich von
Kleist's Amphitryon, directed by Janusz Kica at Bošković
Square, and the latter with the new staging of Držić's Grižula,
directed by Paolo Magelli. One more time Magelli interpreted
Držić as our contemporary, finding in his play an encoded
message about the used-up quality of civilisation, misuse of
power and blockage of communication channels. Omakala's
answer to the question «What do people do in Dubrovnik?» «I am ashamed to say what» has become the key for
understanding the flight of Držić's characters from the City to
its surroundings as the «flight from Europe ruled by bank
clerks». However, the engagement of the play, the
unconventionality of the actor's expression and the spectacular
quality of certain scenes (the play took place behind the Old
Hospital Park, and the actors moved on the ground, on the
branches of pine trees and on the ropes stretched between
them) did not deprive Držić's characters of their immanent
humour, spontaneity and recognizability, which satisfied the
necessary portion of expectations of the local audience, which
Branko Gavella described as «the outstandingly precious
Festival consumer» already a the Festival beginning.
However, many things changed since Gavella's time when, for
instance, the traffic in Gruž Harbour was stopped, so that
street-car noise would not disturb the performance of his
staging On the Terrace. In the early 21st century and at the
height of tourist season, the Festival began to lose the battle
with catering entrepreneurship. The city venues that had once
been ruled by artists, have been lost almost irretrievably, either
because of the restaurants and cafés that have occupied them,
or because of the noise coming from them. In the summer of
2004 this caused the Festival to start sailing towards the
nearby islands. This, in a way, protest sail was at the same
time the continuation of discovering new theatrical venues,
which definitively turned out to be one of the essential
features of Kunčević's and Prlender's directorship.
The first of the two island performances, the unpretentious
authorial project by Vanja Matujec An Island on Which Time
Has Stood Still, was at the same time the first play for children
in the history of the Dubrovnik Festival. It took place on the
Islet of Supetar, while Joško Juvančić staged Ivo Vojnović's
Equinox on the eastern, rocky shore of the Island of Lokrum,
turning it into a melancholic-sentimental Amarcord with an
abundance of contrasts, melodramatic tones and the deliberate
archaic expression. Attractively fitting into the dreamlike
ambient of Lokrum - in whose givens it discovered both the
cues for symbolic-metaphoric accents and functional venue for
the quite realistically designed scenes - Juvančić's play
become another paragon of the Festival's ambient theatre. The
play earned itself a cult status with the local audience partially
owing to a bit surprising fact: it was the first Festival
production of Equinox, whereas the previous one - that had
been on the Festival's repertoire from 1972 to 1974 had actually been a guest performance of the Marin Držić Theatre.
The third premiere on the 55th Dubrovnik Summer Festival
theatre programme took place at Fort Lovrjenac. Using a
seductive blend of word, movement and music, Dora Ruždjak
Podolski staged A Soldier's Tale by Igor Stravinsky and
Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, accentuating the secrecy and poetic
quality of a fairy tale and in a way announcing another step
forward of the Festival repertoire. It happened in the
following, 56th Festival season, when Krešimir Dolenčić
staged the ethereal Jean Giraudoux's melodrama Ondine in
two venues (Šulić Beach and Fort Lovrjenac). Dolenčić,
admittedly, did not quite manage to eliminate the danger of
art-for-art's-sake that inevitably hovers over this fairytale play
about a water nymph who tries in vain to love a mortal. On the
other hand, he managed to create a stunning theatrical
meraviglia in a perfect harmony with the theatrical venues and
the inner rhythms of Giraudoux's characters, which was stylewise flexible enough to absorb the frequent shifts from
melodrama to comedy, from poetry to grotesque and from
realism to surrealism. In the second Festival premiere that
same season, Ivica Kunčević in an even more direct way
continued there where he had stopped with The Old Lady's
Visit. Namely, in the year 2005, the 400th anniversary of the
writing of Cervantes' novel El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote
de la Mancha was marked, so that the character of this
legendary dreamer was revived at the Dubrovnik Festival as
well. However, Kunčević's staging included the dramatization
of this famous novel - more precisely, a few episodes - only in
its first part, performed on a small stage in front of the Jesuit
Church. In the remaining part of the play, performed on the
Jesuit Church stairs and in the Art School Park, Kunčević
actually borrowed from Cervantes only a few characters and a
series of associations, thus creating an indigenous play in
which Don Quijote came into Croatia's everyday life of
transition and tycoons, finding himself in the centre of a story
of the material and spiritual sale and devastation of
Dubrovnik. The dramaturgical co-ordinates of this jigsaw
puzzle - affluently imbued with Vojnović's quotations - were,
however, not assembled in the best possible way, so that the
first part of the play - with plenty of sparkling and well
balanced histrionic quality - turned out to be a lot more
compact and theatrically more intriguing.
After that season, accidentally or not, the Festival again turned
toward classical writers – admittedly, still aspiring to unravel
and re-interpret them through the experience of contemporary
theatrical practice. The summer of 2006 was, therefore, in the
sign of antique playwrights: in the manner of post-modernist
theatre, Ozren Prohić staged the digested version of
Aeschylus' Oresteia in the playground at the foot of Minčeta
Fort, conceptualising it as a contemporary post-war drama,
while - with the dramaturgical and authorial help of Željka
Udovičić and friends - Paolo Magelli staged the play entitled
[email protected], based on Aristophanes’ The Birds, in a
grove at Medarevo. Magelli’s provoking political satire which could also be understood as a probe into social
hypocrisy, a critic of neo-liberalist mind and an essay on
(im)possibility of utopia - stayed half way between the idea
and realization, offering the audience enough cues for further
thinking, but also a lot of dilemmas about the cause and
purpose of certain stage solutions and newly-written speaking
parts.
One of the two theatre premieres at the 58th Dubrovnik
Summer Festival could not deal with such problems: William
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was staged by
Dora Ruždjak Podolski on the Island of Lokrum with the full
appreciation of the text and its basic guidelines, yet without a
stronger authorial contribution which could make her version
of The Dream become more than a beautiful ambient
decoration. Krešimir Dolenčić , on the other hand, started
from a sharply opposed standpoint in his staging of Arkulin in
the Art School Park. In Dolenčić’s own words, he wished to
interpret this Držić’s comedy - that had not been performed at
the Festival before and that had been preserved without the
prologue and introductory part of Act 1 - as “possibly the most
reactionary work by Marin Držić”, and as his squaring of
accounts with the closed Dubrovnik society in which everyone
became a victim of greed and servant of his minute interests”.
Without scarifying the cosmic nucleus of the play, Dolenčić
managed - through a dynamic play, based on the traditional
model of interpreting Držić’s characters - to realise his
aspirations, but also to draw some intriguing parallels with the
contemporariness, proving one more time the openness of
Držić’s dramaturgy and theatrical vitality of his work. A
special kind of counterpoint to such interpretation of Držić
was that season’s premiere of the play Visiting Father Marin.
Conceptualised as a project of Joško Juvanćić workshop, with
the participation of the second and third year students of
acting at the Zagreb Academy of Theatre Arts and a number of
their professors, the play Visiting Father Marin - based on the
scenes from Venus and Adonis, A Story of Stanac, Tirena and
Uncle Maroje - aimed to show various models of playing
Držić’s works from the times of Gavella and Fotez till the
present day. It was also a special kind of homage to the
Festival as, undoubtedly, the major stage for the performance
of Držić’s works, on which - ever since 1950 - the theatrical
quality and vitality of his opus has constantly been analysed.
Juvančić’s workshop was at the same time an integral part of
the planned concept to include the youngest generations of
actors in the Dubrovnik Summer Festival programme,
inaugurated in 2003 by the project of Nataša Rajković and
Bobo Jelčić, and continued in 2006 by the international master
class of the prestigious Belgian theatre and visual artist Jan
Fabre, which was also successfully presented in public.
Both Arkulin and Visiting Father Marin were a good overture
to the forthcoming 59th Festival season, dedicated entirely to
Marin Držić. In the year when the 500th anniversary of Držić's
birth was marked, all three premieres were directly or
indirectly connected with the life and work of this great
Dubrovnik's and Croatia's comedy writer. The first one was
Darsa Farsa, a humorous dramolet in verse written in „Držić's
Dubrovnik dialect“, in which the writer and theatre director
Matko Sršen confronted his own versions of Uncle Maroje,
Scoop and Allgold in order to try Father Marin - in his
absence - for conspiracy (the play was performed in the
Rector's Palace Atrium which was acoustic-wise unsuitable
for the play). The second premiere Voices from the Mountain
was another workshop project, in which Rene Medvešek together with the students of the Zagreb Academy of Theatre
Arts and actors from the Zagreb Youth Theatre - amalgamated
the fragments from Držić's Tirena and Petar Zoranić's The
Mountain into a dramaturgically compact and interpretationwise impressive organic unit. The last premiere was
Kunčević's staging of The Miser at Bošković Square. In spite
of its direct clash with the contemporariness - which occurred
at its end - the play one more time reminded us of the
traditional models and high standards of interpretation of
Držić's works, most of all defined precisely through the
Dubrovnik Summer Festival theatrical practice. The
programme dedicated to Držić also included six guestperformances of his comedies, which were utterly different
where the quality was concerned. Worth mentioning among
them was the Hungarian Uncle Maroje, staged by Attila
Vidnyánszki at the Debrecen Theatre.
These performances were, of course, not the only guestperformances on the Festival theatre programme in the last ten
years. In this period the relatively continuous collaboration
with the Marin Držić Theatre carried on, which, apart from coproduction projects, appeared at the Festival with its own
plays, most often connected with the Dubrovnik theatrical and
literary theme (The Innocent Susannah by Mavro Vetranović,
2002; Pomet by Matko Sršen, 2003; Viola by Luko Paljetak,
2004 and The Lovers by an anonymous author, 2005), which
was at times presented also by other guest theatre companies
(Uncle Maroje performed by the Italian Drama of the Ivan von
Zajc Croatian National Theatre of Rijeka, 1999, as well as
Grižula and Uncle Maroje performed by the American
students' theatre companies of Pennsylvania and Washington,
2004). In addition to occasional guest appearances (for
instance, the Greek National Theatre of Athens with Oedipus
Rex, the Laboratorio Teatro Settimo of Turin with The
Phoenician Women, 2000 and the Miskolc National Theatre
with Paolo Magelli's play Adieu Europe, Europe Adieu, 2007),
the old idea about the exchange of projects with the Split
Summer Festival was also revived (Birdies by Filip
Šovagović, 2001, and Antigone, Queen of Thebes by Tonći
Petrasov Marović, 2005).
However, where guest performances as the planned and
potentially important segment of the Festival theatre
programme are concerned, worth mentioning is the idea of
inviting representative projects of the cosmopolitan
contemporary theatres to Dubrovnik. Promoted in the early
21st century, the idea was soon abandoned, in spite of the
positive reviews and stimulating impulses brought by the
guest-performances of Eimuntas Nekrošius with Shakespeare's
Othello (Dubac Quarry, 2002), Peter Brook with Hamlet
(Island of Lokrum, 2003), and later Jan Fabre with the project
Quando l'uomo principale è una donna (2006).
However, if we interpret the last decade of the Dubrovnik
Summer Festival as a period in which the ideas about its re-
design were interwoven with the attempts to bring new life to
the works on which the Festival theatre had built its specific
quality and recognizability, it is absolutely certain that this
experience could also influence its future.